Cecil Hoffmann, 29, L.A. Law's blond prosecutor, and her prep school pal, real estate executive Paul Slye, 30, exchanged vows on June 20 at the Middlesex School chapel in Concord, Mass. Both attended the school....

Director Frank (Mommie Dearest) Perry, 61, and screenwriter Virginia Brush Ford, 40, wed in Venice on June 15. Perry, who met Ford in Aspen in late 1990, was previously married to screenwriter Eleanor Perry and writer Barbara (Little Gloria...Happy at Last) Goldsmith.

Doyen of food writers M.F.K. Fisher, 83, who penned more than 25 books about her culinary experiences, died June 22 in Glen Ellen, Calif., after a prolonged battle with Parkinson's disease. Fisher wrote evocatively of her own adventures and accompanying meals, describing with relish her first French potato chip or the remembrance of a savory piece of chocolate sliding down her throat on a cold day in southern France....

Bayou fiddler Dewey Balfa, 65, who is widely credited with spreading the sound of Cajun music far beyond his native state of Louisiana, died June 17 in Eunice, La., of liver cancer....

Writer Frederick Exley, 63, whose bleak but moving autobiographical first novel, A Fan's Notes (1968), became a cult book, died on June 17 in Alexandria Bay, N.Y., after suffering two strokes. In Notes, Exley compared his own messed-up life, complete with a failed marriage, bouts of alcoholism and stays in a mental hospital, to the golden success of Frank Gifford, the football idol who attended the University of Southern California when Exley did. Exley published two subsequent novels.

Psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, 71, the onetime Harvard faculty member who advocated turning on, tuning in and dropping out via LSD in the 1960s, and his fourth wife, Barbara, a filmmaker, have separated after 14 years of marriage. "I wish her nothing but the best," says Leary, who now earns his living as a "stand-up philosopher" (his term) on the college lecture circuit and in comedy clubs.

Two skeletons unearthed last summer in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg were identified June 22 as those of Czar Nicholas II and wife Alexandra Romanov, who were executed by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918, at the start of the Russian Civil War.

Country singer Hank Williams Jr., 43, and his wife, Mary Jane, 27, a former model, are expecting their first child this November. Williams has three children from previous marriages.